]]>Perry Chen, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kickstarter — the New York-based crowdfunding platform — is moving on to become chairman of the five-year-old company on January 1, 2014, the company announced today. He will be replaced as CEO by his co-founder Yancey Strickler. In addition, co-founder Charles Adler is moving back to Chicago and transitioning to become an adviser to Kickstarter.

This is a significant change in the company’s management structure, but it shouldn’t impact the company and its mission, Chen outlined in a blog post today. Explaining this decision (one he has been thinking about for some time), he pointed out that he will focus on the big picture and help Kickstarter stay focused on the core mission. In addition, he wants to explore some personal creative projects. From the blog post:

“It’s been almost five years since we launched Kickstarter to the world in late April 2009. Since then we’ve grown from an idea, to a start-up, to a strong, independent company. The team has grown, too. From Yancey, Charles, and me, to 68 of the best people I know.

As early as 2005, Yancey and I would spend hours together imagining and debating the possibilities. Soon Charles joined us. After we launched, Yancey answered every customer service email, then built our Community team, and then our Communications team.…Yancey, who has been helping guide Kickstarter since we started working together eight years ago. Yancey has the love and respect of the team, first and foremost me.”

As someone who has followed the company closely, even from before it was a company, I can attest to that statement about Yancey. He has been the co-CEO of the company for a while, although he didn’t enjoy the title. And Kickstarter has been on a tear: In the five years since it opened its doors, the company has seen five million people back a Kickstarter project. Those backers have successfully funded over 50,000 projects and the success rate is around 44 percent. In a few months, about a billion dollars will have been pledged on Kickstarter.

I am one of those 5 million people and I have been fascinated with it since the first time Perry told me about it. It was years before there was a company, but the idea of peer-to-peer funded creativity made perfect sense. And even today, Kickstarter is more than just a company — it is a socio-economic movement, one that has turned out to be so powerful that it has reshaped the narrative around how creative projects are built and brought to light.

This power to change is one of the reasons why we closely follow the company. One of the reasons why Kickstarter has been able to achieve what it has been able to achieve is because it isn’t run like a classic venture-backed startup — it hasn’t buckled to the pressures that come with over $10 million in venture funding. That non-traditional approach and purity of mission has helped Kickstarter keep its momentum (I wonder if that will change with these new moves). Most of the company’s investors are onboard with Perry’s non-traditional vision, including his reticence to going public.

Four and a half years after launch, Kickstarter is a very important and sustainable business. It will continue to grow, it will continue to fund creativity, and it will continue to do things its own way. Kickstarter was built in Perry’s mold and the unique culture and mission of the Company are derived from him.

That said, I can totally relate to Chen and his desire to step away from a day-to-day role. He has been obsessing over the idea of Kickstarter for nearly a decade. If you spend that much time being immersed in this one thing, you need to remove yourself from the daily routine to get context for where we need to be. I have personally done it and I am better for it, and so is our company.

My view of Kickstarter is summed up by a line I have used before: “it is part of an important shift away from the industrial manufacturing era & toward the maker economy” and it is more important than just an individual. In a wide ranging interview with me, Chen shared his vision for the platform for creativity, and we also spoke at our RoadMap conference last year, the video of which is embedded below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO2_fDh0SB4&w=853&h=480]

At this year’s Roadmap (which is next week November 5th & 6th), we’ll be talking about how crowd-funding is changing design, with Indiegogo founder Danae Ringelmann, and Mladen Barbaric, founder and CEO of Pearl Studios, who led the design of Misfit’s Shine wearable (which raised $845K on Indiegogo).

]]>Crowd-funding giant Kickstarter unveiled some of its latest stats on Tuesday, showing just how quickly the company’s community is growing. More than 5 million people have now backed a Kickstarter project, and almost a third of those people are repeat backers (people who give money to more than one project).

Kickstarter’s backers have successfully funded over 50,000 projects, and the project success rate is around 44 percent (or a little under half). Even more eye-opening, the total amount of money that has been pledged to projects has now hit $849 million, and Kickstarter estimates that by early next year — around their 5th birthday — that amount will cross a billion dollars.

Now that is a big economy. The crowd-funding ecosystem is large and becoming a real source of funding for the arts, for devices, for movies and games, and for design. Most of the projects make up a tiny fraction of the overall funding — 64 percent of projects raised between $1K and $10K, while a small amount (861 projects) raised more than $100K. An even smaller amount (50 projects) raised more than $1 million.

I’ll be discussing the role that crowd-funding plays when it comes to designing new hardware and devices at our Roadmap conference on November 5 and 6 in San Francisco. I’ll be interviewing Indiegogo’s founder and chief customer officer Danae Ringelmann, and Mladen Barbaric, founder and CEO of Pearl Studios — Barbaric was the lead designer on Misfit Wearable’s Shine device, which raised $846K on Indiegogo. At last year’s Roadmap we interviewed Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen.

]]>Inocente, the story of a 15-year-old San Diego homeless girl wanting to become an artist, won the Oscar Sunday for best short documentary. It was also the first Kickstarter-funded film to win an Academy Award. It was one of the three Kickstarter-funded films nominated for an award; the other two being Kings Point and Buzkashi Boys. So far six Kickstarter-funded films have been nominated for Oscars.

Kickstarter is slowly and surely becoming a major force in the film business, something I noted in my post earlier this year. The Inocente win comes close on the heels of Kickstarter-backed films taking center stage at the Sundance Film Festival. According to Kickstarter, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And in 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects in 2012.

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history….any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way.

]]>How is crowdfunding changing the nature of creativity. In today’s podcast we revisit a fireside chat Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen had with Om Malik at our RoadMap Conference in November. In it Chen describes the origins of his popular service and how he wants to keep Kickstarter small and around for generations.

]]>It is Sundance time in America. And what that means it is time to stand up and take note of Kickstarter for the role it is playing in the development of an independent creative movement. In the film and video category alone, New York-based Kickstarter’s impact is notable.

In the past 3 years, Kickstarter inspired filmmakers to launch 20,000+ projects, accounting for over $100 million of the $450 million pledged to date. 19 KS-funded films — 10% of the slate — were official Sundance 2012 selections, with 4 award winners!

Since its early days, the total amount of dollars pledged to Film and Video projects is, as of today, $104.9 million. And the total number of successfully funded projects is 8,680. In 2012, Kickstarter saw $57.96 million dollars pledged and 3,891 successfully funded projects.

we’re used to this industrial creative complex of movie studios, record labels and production houses. It wasn’t always that way. This is relatively recent in human history.

…any dent we can put into the machine we’re happy to do. I think we’re already seeing it. A lot of these things that are getting funded would not have been funded in any way. People are watching films that were made on Kickstarter and playing games that were made on Kickstarter. I think the big media companies are going to continue to have things that they’re going to keep making for the mass audiences, but we hope we’re eating away at the bad stuff.

Three Kickstarter funded films — Kings Point, Buzkashi Boys and Inocente — became the fourth, fifth and sixth films to be nominated for Oscars. Add the good stuff at Sundance, and Kickstarter’s young CEO might be getting his dream of eating at the bad stuff come true.

]]>In a big year for self-funding and crowd-funding, it’s hard to imagine 2012 without Kickstarter. The company revealed some stats on how it is used in a presentation posted Tuesday, highlighting just how big the platform has grown — and what it wants to emphasize about its success.

]]>I spent past few days digging through the archives of GigaOM and have come up with some of my favorite posts that I believe are worth re-reading as we turn the page on 2012. They give you a sense of what I think were big stories for past 2012 and will continue to impact technology ecosystem in 2013.

]]>Kickstarter has taken a bit of heat lately for entrepreneuers not delivering on their projects, but the number of Kickstarter launches continues to climb. It’s up 50 percent, to over 76,909, in the last six months. Film and video remains the most popular category, with more than 21,000 launched projects, or 27% of the total launches in Kickstarter’s 3 1/2 -year history. The games category, meanwhile, has seen a big increase in launches, according to the site’s data.

Buoyed by Double Fine Adventure, which earlier this year received $1 million in just one day, the games category went from the eighth most funded to the second most funded ($75 million) in less than a year.

But more launches doesn’t mean more successes—that rate has held at about 44 % for the site overall, according to Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark. Film and video, the most common Kickstarter category, is the seventh most likely category to be successfully funded. (Note: Kickstarter only consider projects that are completely funded to be successes.)

]]>Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen told his audience at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in San Francisco Monday that he is in it for the long haul. “We don’t ever want to sell this company, we don’t ever want to IPO this company,” he said, explaining that the goal was to build a company that is around for generations. “As a company, we want to stay small,” he added.

Chen also reminisced a little bit about the past of Kickstarter, explaining that he first came up with the idea for it in 2001 when trying to out on a concert in New Orleans. Those plans fell apart when Chen was confronted with too high upfront costs, and he wondered: “What if the audience could have gone online and just bought a ticket?”

That idea of involving the audience early on eventually became Kickstarter, and Chen drew some parallels to other forces of the social web and their way of empowering content creators. “Previously, people could talk to their community via Twitter and blogs,” he said, adding: “Now, you can even get funding from your community.”

Chen said that the nature of the site hasn’t really changed since its launch in 2009, with film still being the biggest category of projects. However, he said that games have quickly become a much bigger deal than they previously were. Last year, $3.5 million were pledged for games, he explained. This year, games have already attracted 20 times as much finding on the site.

Kickstarter recently put out new guidelines to product makers that require them to not post mock photos of their products, and Chen said Monday that it was important for people on Kickstarter to be honest with their community, which includes communicating challenges. “Creators need to… set expectations for their backers,” he said. But backers also need to have realistic expectations, he added. “It’s not a store. It’s not Best Buy.”

]]>When we first got our hands on computers, we weren’t concerned as much about how they looked as opposed to what they could do to make our lives better. Same goes for the early days of the web, when simply publishing something that anyone in the world could read was a treat. But now that computers and connectivity are ubiquitous, design is a vital part of how the best hardware, software, services, and systems are created: good design is the difference between products that make our lives better and those that make our lives more difficult.

We’ve brought together some of the best design-oriented minds we could find to share their insights at RoadMap 2012, starting a little later on Monday in San Francisco. It’s an impressive roster of speakers, including former Apple executive Tony Fadell, now reinventing the way we think about home automation with Nest; Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter and a new way to find grass-roots support for new projects; John Maeda, who is currently teaching the next generation of talented minds how to think about design as president of the Rhode Island School of Design; and Evan Willams, one of the founders behind a simple idea — Twitter — that has changed the world with its intuitive design and the current CEO of Obvious Corp.

We’ll be updating this page with live coverage from the event written by GigaOM’s talented team of writers, and a live stream of the event can also be found here. It all gets started at 8:30am Monday with opening remarks from GigaOM founder Om Malik and Senior Writer Katie Fehrenbacher, who organized the event. Please join the conversation on Twitter by following @gigaom and using the #roadmapconf hashtag.